The heterogeneous nature of tissue has proven to be the limiting factor in the amount of biological information that can be generated from tissue samples. LCM provides the researcher with a means to isolate pure population of cells from heterogeneous tissue specimens. These "captured" cells can then be used in a wide range of downstream assays such as LOH (loss of heterozygosity) studies, gene expression analysis at the mRNA level or in a wide range of proteomic assays such as 2D gel analysis, Western blotting, reverse phase protein array and SELDI protein profiling. Commercial kits for the isolation of RNA and DNA are available and adaptable to the micro samples obtained by LCM.